Technology

I'm a musician. I swear by Beyerdynamic DT700. Fucking great headphones for like an insanely reasonable price

I've been in the audio enthusiast community for like 17 years now. When I was fresh, the internet commentators had me thinking there was some audio heaven in the high end compared to the mid range priced gear. Now I know better and the gear community is not so high end price evangelicals like it used to be. I feel like there was a before and after the $30 Monoprice DJ headphones and the wave of headphones since. Then especially IEMs. Once ChiFi really got rolling with IEMs and amplifiers and DACs, $1000+ snake oil salespeople got to deal in a way more competitive market

Same with speakers. Internet changed everything. No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys. Now you got the whole worlds amount of speaker brands at a click of a finger plus craigslist/offerup. Also again ChiFi amplifiers and DACs. Also improvements in audio codecs whether for wireless or not. Bluetooth audio was awful until it stopped being awful as standards improved

These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys. Headphone and speaker communities these days seem a lot more self aware and steeped in self-deprecating humor over the cost, diminishing returns, placebo, snake oil they live in today compared to 17 years ago. I want my digital audio cables endpoints plated with the highest quality diamonds to preserve the zeros and ones. No lab diamonds. Must be natural providing the warmth only blood diamonds that excel in removing negative ions. I treat my room with the finest pink himalayan salt sound absorbent wall panels to deal with the most problematic materials used by homebuilders. Authentic himalayan salt has been shown to be some of the highest quality material in filtering unwanted noise and echos while leaving clean pure audio bliss

I buy headphone cables based on how nice the cable feels, if it transmits noise when it rubs against stuff, and how well the connectors fit into the devices I am using.

My favorite is when people get picky about cabling for digital transfer. The ones and zeroes either get there or they don't, nothing in-between. They work or they don't.

I think the best thing to do is to assess your ability to hear difference. I can absolutely hear the difference between my Bluetooth earbuds and a decent wired IEM, so I use wired headphones for listening to music. I CANNOT hear a significant qualitative difference between the $25 Chinese IEMs that I use and more expensive options that I have tried, so I use the cheap ones.

To be sure, there ARE perceptible differences between wired headphones, but those are more a matter of EQ and personal preference. I can achieve my maximum perceivable level of quality with pretty inexpensive hardware. It doesn't mean that other people cannot, that isn't my problem.

It's a rich playground for the price-equals-value fallacy, and there are plenty of well-heeled rubes that'll fall for the technobabble.

The one time I was absolutely blown away by a pair of headphones that are not in the insano area, are the beyerdynamic dt1990. They aren't cheap by any means but not insanely expensive. When I listened to music I've listened to hundreds of times, somehow they showed me even more detail I haven't heard before. For example a Nena 99 red balloons LP, the amp was still the same as always but I couldn't believe the amount of detail there was in the background, the soundstage those headphones were creating.

A lot of it comes down to a mix of snobbishness, sunk cost fallacy, and tribalism.

You can't admit that your $5,000 pair of headphones sound exactly the same as a $300 pair, because:

• You'd no longer be able to pretend that you're better than the people who have $300 headphones.

• You'd have to admit to yourself that you completely wasted $4,700.

• You'd have to realize that the tight-knit community you've formed with other $10k headphone people isn't really bettor or even really distinct from communities of people with $300 headphones.

But what's the point of having your newly-purchased $3000 wooden volume knob and polyatomic copper ring bus lift yet another veil from the soundstage if you're blindfolded?

The moment you give me a link to a banana tree/MP3 player/ripeness tester/EQ:

I only listen to music with overripe bananas. It sounds best that way. Copper wire just doesn't sound as good. Believe me: My ears are very sensitive and superior to yours.

Most people don't have proper home stereo setups any more either, and they prefer shitty overcompressed music through earbuds. They don't know any better, sadly.

And Ive probably spent less than 400 dollars on my home setup. But it blows away anyone who hears it. Just takes some smarts in setting stuff up and getting good used equipment.

Just another part of the cheapening of everything in society , and why music isn't appreciated as much anymore. No wonder everyone has depression.

At that quality of MP3 you'd really need either a track that specifically pushes the limits of the codec on technicalities, or a one in a million hearing + high precision monitors.

Albeit FLAC is generally a better option still because it compresses things losslessly, reducing raw file size 50-70% (comparable to MP3 at 128kbps bitrate) and is a royalty-free, meaning it can be freely implemented as a hardware codec.

For example, a bunch of microcontrollers in the ESP32 family have built in FLAC codecs that outperform their MP3 counterparts, meaning a FLAC library can be directly streamed to them, and with the right DAC combo, one can build inexpensive, low power adapters to hook their existing AV systems up to Sonos-style streaming. And with many AV systems supporting bidirectional RS232 (or other serial) communications for controlling the system and querying it's state, you can literally smartify them completely AND provide high quality audio streams to them.

Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and lossless

I'd be surprised if anyone could.

However, 128kbps vs. 192kpbs+ is like night and day, and it's especially obvious with better equipment.

People who say 128kbps mp3 is fine, are full of shit. I've been to weddings where it's been so obvious that whoever's in charge of the music is just blasting 128kpbs mp3s and it's brutal.

Depends on the song really, if it's just a standard pop song it's mixing will usually come through just fine on a shitty MP3. The more layers a song may have the muddier it gets at lower bit rates. Like I've found the noisier spectrum of punk always benefits from higher bit rates.

HugeNerd is correct, 90+% of audio quality is in the mic and speakers. Transducers make electro acoustics real, everything else is support.

Get really great used speakers cheap and an adequate amp just good enough to drive them. Your shit will sound excellent for anyone.